The movie Stanley Kubrick was sabotaged out of directing: “Truth was, it was all a setup”
Setting out his stall as a perfectionist from the beginning, Stanley Kubrick hated his feature-length directorial debut so much that he disavowed it, pretended it didn’t exist, and even tried to erase it from cinema history.
Unfortunately for the meticulous auteur, Fear and Desire didn’t go the way of the Dodo, but he didn’t dwell on his self-perceived failings. Instead, he established himself as one of the most distinctive and gifted filmmakers of his era and eventually all time.
The 1960s was the definitive decade of Kubrick’s career in many respects, with the filmmaker following up the four-time Academy Award-winning box office smash Spartacus with the controversial Lolita, the timeless Dr Strangelove, and the seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, his trajectory would have been altered had he not been sabotaged out of one infamous production.
For his first picture after Spartacus, Kubrick signed on to helm an adaptation of Charles Neider’s novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, renamed for the screen as One-Eyed Jacks. With Marlon Brando attached to play the lead role of Rio, there were realistically only two ways the film would go.
As a pair of Hollywood’s most headstrong and combustible personalities, Kubrick and Brando would either make magic together or end up at each other’s throats. The latter prevailed, with the method actor throwing his weight around to try and seize control of the picture, which inevitably rubbed Kubrick the wrong way.
They’d been developing the movie for two years, and Brando’s indecisiveness had slowed things down to a crawl. All of a sudden, though, he decided to put the pedal to the metal. As Kubrick recalled in Frederic Raphael’s Eyes Wide Open, one meeting pushed him to his breaking point.
“He got everybody in, and we had to sit around the table,” the director offered. “He put this stopwatch on the table. He was going to allow everybody just three minutes to tell him what their problems were. As soon as he’d had three minutes, the buzzer would go. That was all the time they got no matter if they’d finished or not.”
When it was Kubrick’s turn to share his thoughts, he told Brando, “This is a stupid way to do things.” Undeterred, the leading man continued counting down, eventually running out of time. When the filmmaker was informed that his three minutes were up, his response said it all. “Marlon, why don’t you go fuck yourself?”
Everybody went home, waiting for Brando to cool down and resume pre-production, which he never did. Instead, Kubrick quit two weeks before the start of principal photography, opening the door for the actor to step into the breach and make his directorial debut, something the directorial icon was convinced was the plan all along.
“Truth is, it was all a setup,” Kubrick maintained. “He wanted to direct the picture, which is what he did eventually. He wanted me out of there, and he couldn’t figure out how else to do it. That was Marlon.” It would have been a team-up for the ages, but with two such formidable figures on the same film failing to see eye-to-eye, One-Eyed Jacks was only big enough for one of them.
